Where Does A Straitlaced Farmer Get Pot Growing Expertise?

In Eastern Washington, a pair of very different guys teamed up to embark on an experiment to grow Washington’s latest agricultural crop -- legal marijuana.

One of them, Alan Schreiber, is a straitlaced farmer. The other, Tom Balotte, is not a farmer. He's a video-gaming techie. He also doesn’t smoke weed.

Research farmer Alan Schreiber and research assistant Tom Balotte, of Ag Development Group, talk about an ongoing research project in the fields of the 105-acre farm north of Pasco, July 2, 2014. The two have applied for a marijuana growing license so they can become the go-to guys for pest and blight management for pot growers in the state.

Credit Anna King / Northwest News Network

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But he does like to build things.

“I would tear [most of my toys] apart and then I’d lose the parts and never build them back up,” he recalled. “But as I got older I found more and more parts to put my toys back together.”

Balotte’s other love is gaming. You can tell by looking at his tattoos.

“This here is like the little sign of a video game, Oblivion, which is one of the Elder Scrolls games,” he said. “I’m a gamer.”

A gamer -- and a mechanic. Balotte has no traditional training but he’s a tinkerer and he’s good at it.

Schreiber noticed that straight away when he met Balotte about a year ago.

“He is very, very good at what he does,” Screiber said.

Schreiber gave Balotte a job as a mechanic on his farm just north of Pasco, Washington.

Schreiber said they just clicked.

“We do like new projects. We like trying new things and different things,” he said. “And he’d come up with an idea, and I’d come up with an idea on doing this.”

Things really came together last winter, when they attended an agricultural conference in Portland. They were out for a few drinks after a long day of sessions when a light bulb went off.

They would team up and use Schreiber’s farming expertise and Balotte’s mechanical wizardry to dip into this new pot farming experiment.

They scratched a modified hydroponic-like plan on the back of a bar napkin. And the partnership was born.

They knew the state was limiting the amount of square footage for each grower. So why not hatch a contraption that would grow more marijuana per square foot?

And Balotte said it’s not just about pot.

“If you design and perfect a way to grow cannabis efficiently, than maybe you can move on to other things with the same system,” he noted.

The prototype is a weird-looking machine about the size of a vintage Cadillac. It looks a bit like a massive Peruvian pan flute lying on its side. PVC tubes are lined up with cutout holes facing up. Netted cups are placed in each of these openings on the top of the tubes.

“There would be one plant in each of these cups and there would be a nutrient bath that would come in and would go down over the roots,” Schreiber explained. “Eventually, the root ball would grow down to the bottom.”

The grow-system was completed in the spring.

Right now it’s gathering dust in a large greenhouse on the farm while the two collaborators wait for their pot-growing license from the state. There’s a bit of a queue. Nearly 2,500 applications are pending.

But they’re ready to hit play as soon as the state lets them. And they have even more paper-napkin plans for how to alter this machine and make it produce even more pot, but that’s, as Schreiber said, “Off the record, off the record, off the record!”

While Scheiber is waiting, he has plenty of other things to keep him occupied. The pot experiment appealed to him as he’s an agricultural researcher as much as he’s a farmer.

On his farm outside of Eltopia, he’s growing over 300 types of crops from cherries, to white-fleshed watermelon, to purple-hued cauliflower.

Growing pot seems like a lot of hassle for someone that’s already trying to track all those crops plus the pests and pesticides that go with them. So why did he want to do it?

“If you want to know what Washington agriculture is going to be like in the next five to ten years from now, you can come to this farm and see it,” Schreiber said. “And cannabis is going to be another crop. And there is a tremendous need for research on, on cannabis.”

Schreiber said if his farm is approved to grow pot he and Balotte will start building their growing systems by the drove – and improving the design as they learn more. Until then, he’ll focus on this year’s summer harvest.

Meanwhile, his partner/mechanic Balotte still has quite a few machines around the farm to fix.